Team USA’s women just pulled off the thing we claim to love most in American sport: They stared down their toughest rival, took Canada’s best shot, and still found a way to win when it mattered most. On February 19th in Milan, the U.S. women’s Olympic hockey team beat Canada 2–1 in overtime for gold, completing a comeback and sealing it with an extra-time winner.
Within days, though, the public conversation drifted from what the athletes did on the ice to what the US President said on a phone call.
The controversy is not that a president invited champions to be recognized. The controversy is how quickly an elite women’s team became an afterthought, treated like a political chore, then used as the setup for a joke.
How the U.S. Women Beat Canada When It Counted
The women’s final followed the familiar script of the U.S.–Canada rivalry, except for one critical change. The Americans did not blink when the game tilted against them. Canada struck first, and the U.S. spent most of regulation chasing. Then, late, Team USA’s captain Hilary Knight delivered the equalizer, forcing overtime. In extra time, the Americans finished the job for a 2–1 gold medal victory.
That is the kind of win that should stand on its own, untouched by anyone else’s need to posture. It was also an accomplishment that deserved the same national oxygen the men’s program received after its own gold, especially in a winter where American hockey was enjoying a rare, genuine moment of cultural visibility.
Even the numbers tell the story of our attention gap. The men’s gold-medal final became a ratings monster, while the women’s gold-medal game drew a much smaller audience, despite featuring the same rivalry and the same stakes. That disparity is not the athletes’ failure. It is ours, and it is reinforced when leaders treat women’s excellence as optional.
The Call, the Invitation, and the “I’d Be Impeached” Line
The flashpoint was a now-viral moment involving President Donald Trump and the U.S. men’s hockey team. In a call that was widely circulated and reported, Trump invited the men’s team to attend the State of the Union and then joked that he would “probably be impeached” if he did not invite the women’s team too.
Crucially, that joke came first. Only after the call, and after the remark had already ricocheted through social media and cable segments, did reporting confirm that the U.S. women’s team declined an invitation due to scheduling conflicts and “previously scheduled academic and professional commitments.”
So this was not a case of Trump reacting to a snub. The dismissal was baked into the moment. The women’s team was framed as a box to check, a move required to avoid punishment, rather than champions worthy of the spotlight because they had earned it.
Declining the Invite Is Not the Scandal
USA Hockey’s explanation for the women’s decision has been consistent. The invitation arrived amid already-set obligations, and the timing made it impractical. That should have been the end of it. Athletes have lives, seasons, school, recovery, and jobs. Not every honor can be accepted, and not every decline is a referendum on the White House.
The larger pattern, though, invites comparison to another high-profile moment in American women’s sports. Megan Rapinoe and the U.S. women’s national soccer team during the 2019 World Cup. Rapinoe publicly said she was not going to the White House if the team won, and Trump responded by criticizing her and framing her comments as “disrespect.”
There is a key difference. Rapinoe’s stance was explicit, political, and preemptive. The hockey team’s decision, as reported, was logistical and rooted in existing commitments. Yet in both cases, the gravitational pull of the presidency threatened to swallow the story that actually mattered: women winning on the world stage.
“It’s Just a Joke” and Why That Defense Keeps Failing
Some observers argue Trump’s line was harmless, that it was typical locker-room ribbing, and that critics are overreacting. That argument is tempting because it is easy. It asks nothing of the speaker and everything of the people expected to swallow the insult politely.
But jokes do not exist in a vacuum. When a president jokes that recognizing women champions is something he “has” to do, it signals that women’s success is a compliance issue, not an achievement. It also lands differently because Donald Trump has a long, well-documented history of degrading talk about women, including the infamous 2005 “Access Hollywood” remarks in which he described groping women without consent.
And Trump’s record is not limited to crude talk. In the E. Jean Carroll civil cases, juries found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and appellate reporting has described courts upholding major judgments against him. You do not have to stretch or speculate to see why millions of Americans hear his “I’d be impeached” crack and conclude it reflects contempt, not comedy.
This is why the “no big deal” defense collapses. Respect is not a punchline you get credit for remembering at the last second.
From the White House to the Algorithm
This kind of casual dismissal does not stop at politics. It seeps outward, into culture, into social media, and into the attitudes young men absorb every day. When a president treats women’s achievements like a box he “has” to check, it reinforces the same message pushed by online figures like Andrew Tate, whose content is built around dominance, grievance, and open contempt for women, and whose audience skews overwhelmingly young and male.
Tate is not an isolated case. Other podcasts, personalities, and influencers like Tate thrive on a similar ecosystem, one that frames women as obstacles, prizes performative masculinity, and treats empathy as weakness. Their reach is massive, and their messaging lands hardest on boys and young men who are still forming their ideas about relationships, power, and respect.
This is what people mean when they say the culture is being poisoned. It is not just about one joke or one president. It is about how authority figures normalize dismissal and how that dismissal gets amplified through algorithms until it becomes identity. When adult men laugh along instead of pushing back, they help legitimize a worldview that tells young males that women’s success is negotiable, conditional, or worthy of ridicule.
And that is the real damage. It is not abstract. It shows up in classrooms, locker rooms, comment sections, and dating culture. Furthermore, it teaches boys that respect is optional and teaches girls that even excellence does not guarantee dignity.
Which is why moments like this matter. Because Team USA’s women did everything right. They won gold. What failed them was the culture waiting on the other side of the ice.
The Men’s Team Should Not Have Laughed
The most dispiriting detail in this story is not that a politician told a bad joke. It is that, as the reports describe it, the men on the call laughed along.
These are elite athletes who understand what it takes to win at the highest level. They know the difference between a courtesy clap and genuine respect. They also know, better than almost anyone, that women in hockey have had to fight for resources, attention, coverage, and legitimacy in ways men rarely do.
If the men’s team wants to share in the glow of a resurgent moment for American hockey, it should not come at the expense of the women who also brought home gold. Laughing at the implication that women must be included to avoid punishment is not “just team banter.” It is how a culture teaches itself, again and again, that women’s excellence is secondary.
What Celebration Would Actually Look Like
Celebrating the women “just as much” as the men does not mean forcing identical narratives onto different teams. It means treating women’s achievements as central, not conditional. It means media coverage that leads with what happened in the gold medal game, not what happened on a phone call. Likewise, it means political leaders who can praise champions without turning them into props in a culture-war punchline.
Most of all, it means adult men taking responsibility for the tone they set. Because when the country’s most powerful man treats women’s achievement as an obligation, plenty of less powerful men feel licensed to do the same. That is how contempt becomes normal. That is how it poisons the culture.
And that is why the story of Team USA’s women should not be reduced to whether they attended a speech. They won gold against Canada in overtime. Start there. Stay there. Celebrate that.
—Greg Collier